Quare Fellas

Abstract

Writing almost two decades after the term ‘queer’ was appropriated from homophobic discourse to form a post-structuralist paradigm for the disruption of the binarism inherent in sexuality as a marker of identity, little use of the term has been applied to the performance of queerness in Irish theatre. There are obvious reasons for this historically, of course. First, the suturing of the nation with the theatre in the cultural and political imaginary enshrined theatre as a cultural medium within a newly emerging hegemonic paradigm. Second, the theocratic influence on the new nation sought to retain any of the Victorian legislation that could be useful for its own religious project. One of the principal cornerstones of that legislation that was retained was the law criminalizing homosexuality. The 1861 Offences Against the Person Act and the 1885 Criminal Law (Amendment) Act brought into being by the UK parliament was eventually repealed in 1967 but still lingered on in the Republic of Ireland until 1993. Northern Ireland, as a constituent part of the United Kingdom, only repealed the law in 1982 after a long and bitter oppositional campaign entitled ‘Save Ulster from Sodomy’, spearheaded by the then firebrand loyalist politician, the Reverend Ian Paisley.

The title is an obvious reference to Brendan Behan’s 1954 play The Quare Fellow. My own title is a queering, after Noreen Giffney, of the term ‘queer’ (‘Quare Eire’ in Journal of Lesbian Studies, Vol. 11, No. 3–4 (2007): 275–89) in an Irish context, but going further by using the colloquial ‘fella’ as a deliberate strategy to unhinge Irish theatrical masculinities from a fixed gender binarism.